Bruce Hausknecht: Polygamy Waiting in the Wings While Supreme Court Addresses the Definition of Marriage

August 23, 2012 at 12:15 pm

Dan Savage recoiled when our President Brian Brown argued in their debate that redefining marriage opens the door to legalizing polygamy. Bruce Hausknecht of CitizenLink independently shows how the legal trajectory in the United States supports Brown's claims:

"If you believe that the Constitution requires that a man be allowed to marry another man, or a woman be allowed to marry another woman, then why shouldn’t a man be able to have four wives?

That’s what a federal lawsuit going on in Utah claims. (My earlier coverage is here.) And it’s based on the same 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, that every argument for same-sex marriage – as well as a handful of court decisions – have used for justification. Lawrence, as you may recall, threw out a Texas criminal sodomy statute as an unconstitutional violation of the “right of privacy,” the same “right” that was also used in 1973 in Roe v. Wade to constitutionalize abortion.

A federal judge has refused to dismiss a Utah lawsuit (Brown v. Herbert) that claims that polygamy is a guaranteed privacy right under the U.S. Constitution.

... Although same-sex marriage advocates are fond of saying that this fundamental clash over the definition of marriage is all about them, it’s obvious that it’s not. Same-sex marriage is only the current issue. Polygamy, group marriage and who knows what else, are waiting in the wings.

Either marriage means what it’s always meant, or it will end up meaning whatever the next interest group wants it to mean."